HuffPo’s Fazenda Fantasia

It’s relatively rare for reports from origin to appear in the mainstream media, or even its AOL TimeWarner Murdoch Media owned blogosphere. But in a feature that appeared yesterday on The Huffington Post, Michelle Won is bucking the trend, visiting the Dallis Bros. Coffee fazenda in Riberiao Preto. Like most people who go to source, you come back realizing that $1.50 cup of coffee is really inexpensive, considering the work that goes into it. It’s what evangelical baristas try to convey to consumers.

Coffee pickers usually work 8-10 hours a day. I spent just about an hour in the sun, picking the berries, and I was spent. Over the course of the next few days, I saw the next steps. The Octavio farm produces a natural coffee and a semi-washed coffee. In the natural process the coffee beans are dried in the sun, raked so that they do not grow any mold or mildew, then the outer skin and pulp are removed from the bean. The second, semi-washed, means the berries are rinsed off, and the twigs and leaves and bugs are removed from the batch of cherries. Then the pulp-y portion of the cherry is removed, but there is still some of the fruit left on the bean. That then gets dried and separated.